What 17 years of survival taught Paga about building fintech in Africa

In a continent where fintech startups have burned through hundreds of millions of dollars chasing growth, Paga has done something rarer: it has simply lasted.

In a conversation with Samora Kariuki, founder of Frontier Fintech, Paga co-founder and CEO Tayo Oviosu laid out why, and his answers are poles apart from much of what the industry has spent the last decade believing.

The clearest example is Paga’s decision to stay out of the card-gateway war that produced Paystack and Flutterwave. “Strategy is largely about deciding what not to pursue,” Oviosu argued, explaining that Nigeria was never fundamentally a card-first market, and competing in an already crowded segment would have pulled Paga’s resources away from where it had a genuine edge.

Instead of fighting for space in card payments, Paga concentrated on alternative payment rails, a decision that looked unambitious at the time but kept the company out of a brutal, capital-intensive race it did not need to win.

That same discipline shaped how Paga approached its own ambitions. Oviosu’s central thesis is that financial inclusion at scale was never going to come from building “another bank.” His comparison is to Amazon Web Services, a company that won not by competing directly with the businesses it served, but by building the infrastructure layer underneath them.

This became what he calls the "Paga Engine" thesis: rather than remaining purely consumer-facing, Paga evolved into infrastructure, providing the backend systems that let banks, wallets, retailers, and other businesses embed financial services into their own platforms.

He also pushed back on a common industry assumption that agent banking in Nigeria is a maturing, near-saturated business. Oviosu sees it differently….